


Here's To Surviving: Here's To Guilt

by saturnsage



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Gen, Post-Heartbreak Incident, Spoilers, broken relationships, mentions of terminal illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 14:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18075008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturnsage/pseuds/saturnsage
Summary: Chen’s traitor mind supplies with: I would have picked you.Chen’s trained mouth instead answers with: ”Anathema.”____"When I’m drunk I think about leaving you with your telepath dampeners and then saving him.”





	Here's To Surviving: Here's To Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> this is so edgy

It’s the monstrous thing he’s hiding that makes Ricardo think about comparing. Connecting two lines; one’s a triangle, the other’s a square. Apples and oranges, rust and paprika.  It’s the monstrous thing in the shape of a fifth heart chamber that says this girl’s mouth he’s kissing isn’t Jie-Sun, and that’s why he doesn’t like kissing it as much.

 

The girl’s lips have got a lipstick stain of those margaritas with too many cherries in them; she tastes like wine and the feeling Ricardo’s going to get in the morning. Expensive flowery perfume, makeup that doesn’t let you see her pores or the real color of her eyelashes. 

  
Her mouth is like wildness, like sweet beer, like cough drops. Jie-Sun’s mouth was the unknowingness of everything, like if cyanide was saccharine, like anxiety meds Jie-Sun didn’t swallow.

  
And if Ricardo pretends, and if he acts like his sense of smell was broken from the punching bag that hit face and made him blurry-eyed, then he can add it together. Wildness can be the fear of oblivion, beer can be a killer, cough drops have enough medicine in them.   
  
One of those warnings his mom gave him; “ _You shouldn’t break hearts, mijo!”_

Funny, that.   
  
That fifth heart chamber beats like a tumor.

_X X X_

Being too industrial is a fault, right? He’s heard something of it before.   
Something along the lines of ‘if you work too hard, you’ll burn out.’

 The problem with this for him though, is that he’s built to work. He’s supposed to work more than the others, because that’s how he was made. It’s like they made a little Ikea instruction booklet to go along with him. “Directions: Work him to the bone, gets his gears running smooth.” 

And you know, he’s been listening to those instructions real well. His gears are running like crazy, he’s never had a moment to sit down. Warning: If outside sources telepathic in nature seem to be overriding the motherboard, the best course of action is to-

To what? No one’s wrote that in the fucking coding.

Wei stares at his hands, those contraptions worth more than anything he’ll use them for. They’re strong enough to hold up the entire world. They’re strong enough to start ripping the wires on his shoulders and knees out of him one by one till every single one of them is leaking gasoline. Those B-movies where the only way to get rid of a bomb is to slam it’s wiring out. 

  
Warning: If there’s that lingering feeling of dread that tints your eye-color to a really nasty red, that makes a phlegm so thick that it gets stuck in your windpipe, then what? Then what?  
  
The therapist doesn’t know of this when they ask: “Mr. Chen, how are you feeling right now?”   
  
 _I hate asthma and I think I’m claustrophobic I hate asthma and I think I’m claustrophobic I hate_  
  
“Gritty. I think I’m due for an oiling.” Chen says, as a joke, and it feels so strange to pretend he’s who he was before the end.

 X X X

The room’s as black as the night outside and as Chen’s diaphragm. Black lung? What’s that thing that involves coal dust and digging into a mine that kills you off? How about dust that gets stuck in a computer’s vents?  
  
He doesn’t hear Ricardo’s mods whirr, as sprawled as the man is on couch, and that irrational fear that the room’s black because it’s dead is pushed so far down Chen’s systems he feels it only on his Achille’s tendon.

“Ricardo.” He says, because nothing makes him scared. Nothing makes him sweat.  
  
Ricardo is sprawled on the couch, head tilted up, hand barely grazing an empty beer can on the carpet next to him. His eyes are glassy, but they move. It’s like he dies with his eyes open. The long eyelashes do nothing to cover the fish stare, clumped and crusted as they are.   
  
The mods are off. Either Ricardo messed it up by accident (mining in those coal dusted walls/claustrophobia) or on purpose. (“Survivor’s guilt,” Said that therapist.)  
  
“I used to be so fucking scared of this,” Ricardo starts, when he notices Wei and acknowledges him by the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. His voice is hideous. It’s the closest thing to a Chernobyl factory machine Wei will ever hear.   
  
“I used to be terrified of this. The not moving. When I just woke up I’d try to move my arm and then nothing- and. And I’d get so scared, yeah?”   
  
“Ricardo,” Chen says, already thinking of obituaries. 

  
He’s lying there, so still, as frozen as the moon when it’s not following your car.

 “And I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t really think it’s fair that my legs and shit get to move and not— not feel when I feel like it’s the end of the world. I could’ve gone and helped. I hate pretending like it doesn’t fucking hurt me.” Knowing Ortega, the mumbling means his neck is starting to act like his head’s being held up by syringes, like the couch is welding metal into his bones.  
  
  
“Ricardo,” Chen croaks, already thinking how Hollywood got the undead wrong, “Roll over, so I can see what you did.”   
  
“I can’t. Isn’t it obvious? I can’t.” Ricardo says, and his eyes close, lashes fluttering. “The docs back then said I was paralyzed neck down.”  
  
“God.” Chen says, before stepping over and gingerly lifting one of Ricardo’s prosthetics.   
  
It takes Chen thirty minutes to turn the mods back on, and pretends Ricardo isn’t relishing every single minute of his mods his dad gave him being useless.   
  
X X X

  
“Do you hate me?” Ricardo asks, sitting on the desk. “It would make sense.”

There’s ice in the shape of a fist clenching his lungs when he asks that. The bolts of lightning form a kevlar net and tie around his tongue so much it leaves those red imprints you get after wearing a hair tie for too long.   
  
Chen doesn’t reply fast and quick, despite that being in his nature. One of those who text right back, you know. One of those who find you stuffing your head down a sewer drain in the middle of two AM and makes a sink-hole to fish you out. 

“No.” Chen replies, lying. Then he stops lying. “Not all the time.”

  
The fist turns into a punch, and it hits the front of Ricardo’s spine so hard it feels like there’ll be a hole in him when he looks in a mirror.

  
“When?” He asks again, because this office is off the grid, and because Ricardo turned off the cameras in his body too make sure he doesn’t look pretty.  
  


“I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”

  
“Is it because of what I said?”  
  
Chen sighs, and rubs his face with one palm. Civilian hands. The bags under his eyes grow longer when the skin of his face pulls. “You want me to tell you?” He says, voice low. He sounds like the beginning of the world. He sounds like how Ricardo’s mom does when she’s reading the end of the Bible. Revelations. Small world.  
  
Ricardo can stand to be a saint, if only for a few minutes. “If it helps.”  
  
“You saved my life back there. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead, and I think I owe you forever,” Chen starts, and he turns into Wei. “That’s another debt I’ll spend the rest of my life repaying. That’s another tally on the shit I’ll never pay back. You pretty much own me.”  
  
And because Ricardo is pretending to be a saint, he shakes his head and opens his mouth to argue, before Wei cuts him off. 

  
“You’d think the same.  _Ricardo_. Neither one of us are good at accepting favors.”  
  
And because he pretends to be standing in a confession box, Ricardo says “You know I don’t, though. Own you. Right?”  
  
“Most of the time. You done hearing?”  
  
“If there’s more, I need to know.” Confessions, a sinner to a sinner, and this is why he’s not religious.   
  
“Some nights I get so paranoid about the shit you’re gonna pull. I never can read you, and it sucks, because I don’t know what you’re gonna do next, whether you’re gonna act like a Marshall or some kid that jumped off the Hollywood sign.” Wei says, so matter-of-fact, so brisk and cold. 

That hangover drink that actually works. That alarm clock that makes you want to hit it so it falls to the floor.  
  
Ricardo says nothing, and turns into Ortega.

“I was fine with that before, I was.” Wei keeps going, because he always acted like Ortega and Ricardo were the same. “Because you could pull your act together, because your dad was around to make sure you pulled your act. I hate your dad. I hate him. You sounded exactly like him back there.”  
  
Ortega says nothing, and turns into Charge.   
  
“We’re both nothing but—but  _machines_ , Ricardo.”  
  
Ricardo is the same as Charge, in Wei’s eyes. Maybe it was on purpose they modded his eyes. 

  
“We’re the same to those AK-47s the military pulses out. You said that, and you believed every word, and you know how much I hate that you believe it. “  
  
Charge says nothing, but sighs, and itches for Jie-Sun.  
  
Wei’s voice goes darker still, like he’s trapping himself into a shark cage.   
  
This isn’t a therapy session. This is damnation.

“I already knew. Don’t you get it? I know that fact every day. I eat it. I breathe it. It gets in my hair and thats why i buzz it off.” Wei says, and his words don’t trip. The mallet of a judge could stand to learn a few things from Steel. 

“The heartbreak there said the only way to get rid of it was to die, because it would’ve been my choice. I could have done something for myself.”

The way he says myself.   _Myself_. As if it’s been shoved into an abandoned attic, as if a tsunami swallowed it away.   _Myself_. Charge can’t remember the last time he’s heard that word being used.

  
“Chen.” Charge whispers, crumbling the saint image away, but Wei brings a hand up, and keeps going.  
  
“I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust the cameras. I don’t trust these floors. I don’t trust the air i’m breathing right now. Don’t you get it? That was the only thing I ever trusted.” And because Steel is not Chen, and Chen is not Wei, they both topple over, the deaths of three men into one solidity.   
  
Ricardo claws his way back into his own skin, and shakes the ice off, and eats the lightning so it resides in his stomach. “Chen, I’m not going to say I’m sorry.”   
  
“See, I know that, but I don’t trust you to keep your word.”   
  
X X X

  
“You’re angry at me too.” Wei says.   
  
Ricardo keeps punching the wall, thinking about how broken wine bottles could become great gauntlets.   
  
“No.” He answers.  
  
Wei leans against the gym wall, too tired to support himself, too knowing to keep it simmering. “Liar.”

( **You’re going to let your lover die while holding on to his gun**.)  
  
                          ( **You’re going to watch him**.)

                                                           ( **I know you can hear me too. That storm isn’t as is as is as is anymore. You’ve kept stifling it.** )

  
“I think I hate you when I’m drunk.” Ricardo heaves, and thinks about slamming every lightbulb  in this building with a baseball bat that Jie-Sun once used.He stops punching the wall, and presses his forehead against it, instead.  
  
Wei hums, probably expecting something worse. Probably searching for an answer in one of his text-books. “You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you.” He says, not offering help. 

**(You are going to**

**let him**

**slip** ****

**through your** **hands.** )

Ricardo has dreams of that day being in the middle of a night, where the moon was hiding and the light pollution hurting the sky.   
  
Once, Jie-Sun told him he’s never seen the stars.   
  
 _Moved too fast,_  He had said, because saying things was so intimate for him.  _Too many people wherever I went. It’s alright though. I think I’d be scared of them_.  
  
And in those dreams, the sidewalk is made of stars, and the spaces between the stars grow red. 

Ricardo’s next words sound like the spitting of a loose tooth. Click clack of Russian Roulette.“I chose you over him. I chose you when I didn’t know I had to make a choice.” 

God, that’s such a terrible thing to say to a person whose hurting just as much as you.  
  
“Who would you have picked?” Wei asks, and Ricardo closes his eyes, and laughs.   
  
Thank God the cameras aren’t here, thank God he doesn’t have a baseball bat, thank God he can still feel his dad’s stares when he’s about to do something horrid.   
  
His dad is dead. It was a relief. Ricardo replies with: “Who would you have picked?”  
  
X X X  
  
Chen’s traitor mind supplies with:  _I would have picked you._  
Chen’s trained mouth instead answers with: ”Anathema.”

X X X  
  
“Yeah. When I’m drunk I think about leaving you with your telepath dampeners and then saving him.”   
  
God, what a disgusting thing to admit to someone who saved you life, and you, his.

  
X X X  
  
  
One thing that Ricardo will make Wei trust in is this: They will never apologize to each other, but maybe, eventually, they will stop hating each other.   
  
Maybe. Eventually.

Wei still wraps his wounds, carries his drunken shame home.   
  
Ricardo still feeds Wei, still cleans out his mods and slips him painkillers.

Eventually. Maybe.


End file.
